10 steps to success with your distributed monitoring

Setting up distributed monitoring in mission critical production environments is a complex task; configuration can be challenging and mistakes costly. Opsview Enterprise edition and Opsview Syncmaster module make deploying an enterprise...

Setting up distributed monitoring in mission critical production environments is a complex task; configuration can be challenging and mistakes costly. Opsview Enterprise edition and Opsview Syncmaster module make deploying an enterprise monitoring system easy and reduce the risks associated with migrating configuration objects from development to production environments. Here’s how:

1. Get everything done in one place

Opsview’s configuration User Interface makes it quick and easy to get things done. Any configuration you need to make is carried out in one place, no jumping between screens or applications required. All the complex processing is kept 'under the hood' so you can focus on what’s important to you - configuring your monitoring environment the way you want it.

2. Maintain consistent configurations with host templates

Templates in Opsview can help you maintain consistent monitoring configurations throughout your system. Pre-defined templates are included for many hardware, operating systems and applications such as Cisco kit, Drupal CMS or the MySQL database. Any changes you make to a template will affect the whole configuration, giving you a quick way to make consistent, controlled changes to your distributed monitoring system.

3. Reduce configuration errors with cloning

In Opsview you can quickly configure identical objects by using the clone function. In large environments chances are you will have lots of identical pieces of equipment such as network devices. Rather than having to manually enter configuration information for each one you can simply clone an existing device as many times as you need, saving time and reducing errors.

4. Speed up configurations with embedded SNMP capabilities

Opsview’s embedded SNMP polling and trapping detects SNMP interfaces so you don’t have to. This takes away much of the time consuming configuration involved with a complex distributed monitoring system and reduces the chances of input errors which could, in some other systems, cause a malfunction.

5. Manage complex configurations with attributes

Attributes In Opsview help you maintain checks on complex configurations. Instead of configuring service checks for individual hosts you can create one check and use attributes to carry out checks on each host. For example you might want a check on VMhosts which could be running 20 or 30 virtual machines. With attributes you can set up one service check on a guest VM and use attributes to reference all the virtual machines on the host.
Find out more about setting up attributes in Opsview.

6. Get Notified

Notification profiles help you keep on top of your distributed monitoring by making sure your team get the notifications they need when they need them. You can decide who gets notified, why they get notified and how. For example you can set up your profile to get e-mail notifications during normal working hours if your system is in a warning state, but for more critical notifications, such as a system outage, an SMS can be sent to an onsite-engineer.

7. Get industrial strength change management with Opsview Syncmaster

Opsview Syncmaster module helps you follow change management procedures and takes away the risk of errors caused by untested system configurations. With Opsview Syncmaster you eliminate costly downtime and speed up system configuration, all from one single point of control.

8. View status and configure hosts

Start off by using Opsview Syncmaster to see which hosts are being monitored. From the Opsview Syncmaster interface you can see detailed summary information about your monitored systems, such as current status, which slave servers are configured for monitoring, if configurations are up to date or even the performance latency of the monitoring system. From here you can also directly access the configuration UI of each host.

9. Easily move objects

Opsview Syncmaster enables you to easily move objects between environments, whether on-premise, off-site, or virtualised, by dragging and dropping from one environment to another, e.g. drag a slave between slave clusters or drag hosts between host groups.

10. Synchronise objects between servers and safely deploy

One of the key strengths of Opsview Syncmaster is the ability to synchronise objects between servers. You can synchronise one or multiple objects, either by using an existing profile or by creating a new one. For example you may have created a new user and want to synchronise the user across all systems or to migrate an application in a test environment across to production. Simply select the source system and the target system and decide which configuration object(s) you want to synchronise. Opsview Syncmaster then safely migrates the chosen settings between environments with just a click of a mouse.

Find out more about distributed monitoring with Opsview Enterprise edition - check out our Live Demo.